The fix was to wipe the hard drive and install with the "free/retail" version of Vista.

As best as I can determine, there is something incompatible between the checked/debug build and the drivers for my hardware. What this is I cannot say.

However, even if this was not true, you want to use a non-debug version of the binaries anyways because of the performance issues.

From the MSDN site:

"Because the checked build contains fewer optimizations and more debugging checks than the free build, the checked build is both larger in size and slower to execute than the free build. As a result, the free build is used in production environments unless it is necessary to use the checked build to identify serious problems."

So if I had just used the correct DVD when installing the OS, I could have saved myself some heartache...